


perchance to dream

by sara_wolfe



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor OC Death, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-04-22 17:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22195498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sara_wolfe/pseuds/sara_wolfe
Summary: Crowley sleeps, and he dreams, and he yearns for that which he thinks he'll never have.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 73
Collections: Good Omens Holiday Swap 2019





	perchance to dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gwyn_Paige](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gwyn_Paige/gifts).

> There's a brief scene of Crowley's nightmare involving the death of an OC child due to the Plague. If you want to skip that scene, scroll when you hit the sentence, "He woke again to Hell." and start reading after the next section break.
> 
> for the Good Omens Holiday Exchange prompt: _Aziraphale tells Crowley he loves him in a dream. Crowley doesn't believe him._
> 
> **Gwyn_Paige**, I am so sorry that this is so late.

Crowley hadn’t meant to fall asleep that very first time. 

He hadn’t even known that he could, if he was being honest. But he and Aziraphale had just finished a truly excellent meal that had started with oysters and had continued until they’d practically eaten through all of poor Petronius’s new restaurant, and then they’d retired back to Aziraphale’s rooms to indulge in some more wine. And everything was so quiet and warm and comfortable that Crowley just couldn’t help it. He could feel himself slowing down and becoming more and more lethargic, could feel his eyes drooping closed no matter how hard he tried to keep them open. And then he must have lost some time in there, because the next time he opened his eyes, his wineglass was lying on the floor, contents soaking into the tiles, he was slumped awkwardly in his seat, glasses smashed against his cheek, and Aziraphale was staring at him in shock from the other side of the room. 

“You were - I thought-” He shook his head, lost for words. “I thought you died,” he finally said, emphatically, eyes still a little wide. 

Crowley forced a smirk onto his face, to hide how unsettled he felt. “Why, Angel, were you worried about me?”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Aziraphale grumbled, scowling at him when his smirk only got bigger. “Crowley, what just happened?”

“I think I fell asleep for a few seconds,” Crowley told him. 

Aziraphale’s frown deepened, confusion clear on his face. “You what?”

“Sleep, Angel,” Crowley said. “You know, that thing humans do occasionally?” When Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at him, silently demanding a further explanation, Crowley tried to clarify. “Humans don’t have a lot of energy, so if they stay awake for too long, their bodies just kind of shut off for a while-”

“Like dying!” Now Aziraphale looked horrified, like it was the worst thing he’d ever heard. Crowley didn’t blame him; the whole sleep thing had freaked him out when he’d first discovered it, too.

“Not really,” Crowley tried to reassure him, but Aziraphale didn’t seem to be listening to him. 

“What if they do this ‘sleep’ thing but they never wake up?” he demanded, a little frantically, distress coloring his tone. “How do you know they wake up every time? Could that actually happen? Could it happen to you?”

“I-I suppose,” Crowley admitted reluctantly. “But, Angel, humans have been figuring out this sleep thing for a long time, now. They’re not going to just die, every time they close their eyes.”

“Adam and Eve never did anything like this!” Aziraphale insisted. 

“Eh,” Crowley shrugged, “I always figured that God was using them to work out the kinks in the future humans.”

“But having to sleep doesn’t seem like an improvement,” Aziraphale protested. Then, with the tone of someone indulging a morbid curiosity, he leaned forward and whispered, “What was it like?”

Now it was Crowley’s turn to be confused. “What, sleeping?”

Aziraphale nodded, eagerly. “What did it feel like?” he asked. “Was it warm, or cold, or-”

“Didn’t really feel like anything, really,” Crowley interrupted him. “I mean, I was awake one second, and then again some time later, but I don’t remember anything that happened between those two points. It was just a big bunch of nothingness, I guess.”

Aziraphale shuddered, wrapping his arms around himself like he was trying to ward off a chill. “That sounds horrible,” he said. 

“Wasn’t really all that bad,” Crowley said, trying to explain something he couldn’t even really describe to himself. 

“No,” Aziraphale declared, emphatically, shaking his head. “No, thank you, I will not be joining you in this sleeping thing.” 

“Don’t worry, Angel,” Crowley replied, “I don’t see myself doing it anytime soon again, either.”

* * *

Dreaming came next. 

Despite his words to Aziraphale all those years ago, Crowley had spent the next thousand or so years honing his ability to fall asleep. He hadn’t done it intentionally, at least not the first couple of times, but those first couple accidental naps had apparently conditioned his body to want to sleep, and after a while it just became easier to give into the impulse whenever he felt himself getting tired. 

He also found that he enjoyed sleeping. Granted, not remembering anything about the process was still unsettling, but he woke up less tired than before he’d fallen asleep, so he was willing to overlook the less-than-good parts. Plus, there was something almost sinful about ignoring Hell’s orders in favor of sleeping. At least, that was the argument he used whenever he reported in to the bosses. So far, they hadn’t called him on it, and he got to enjoy his sleeping in peace. 

But then the fourteenth century happened. Devastation - later to be known as the Black Death - swept through Europe, leaving nothing but corpses and grief in its wake. Pestilence had done gruesome work in such a short period of time, with nothing able to stand against her. 

Millions upon millions of lives lost, no matter how hard Crowley tried to save them. He’d come out the other end of the plague more tired than he’d ever been in his immortal life. He wanted nothing more than to sleep for a century. 

But sleep did not come easy. He tossed and turned, unable to get the images of the plague victims out of his mind. Finally, desperate to sleep even a little bit, he performed a quick miracle on himself. A few seconds later, his eyes grew heavy and he surrendered to the darkness. 

He woke again to Hell. 

Not literally Hell; that would have actually been preferable to where he was. No, he was in one of the isolation camps where he’d spent so much of the last several years. He’d forgone the plague doctor’s usual garb; he couldn’t contract or carry the disease, and he’d found that people were more at ease being able to see his face. He was sitting by the bedside of a young girl, one of the last people he’d treated, one of the last ones he’d lost. 

The girl lay listless on the rough mattress, eyes sunken in her skull and blood-tinged foam dotting her lips. Despite everything Crowley had tried to do for her, she was going to die. It was only a matter of when, and how much pain she’d endure before the end. Unless he did something about it.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered, leaning close so that the child could hear him. “I’m going to make you all better.”

“Will I-” The girl broke off coughing, violent spasms that rocked her small frame. Crowley held her in his arms, used as much magic as he dared to take away her pain. When her coughing subsided, he helped her lay back down on the bed. “Will I see my mother, now?”

The girl’s mother had died just that morning. Crowley hadn’t been able to bring himself to tell her. 

“You will,” he promised, hoping that he wasn’t lying. That God would show enough mercy to allow the child to be reunited with her mother in death. “Why don’t you close your eyes, and then when you open them again, your mother will be the first person you see.”

The girl managed a weak smile, closing her eyes, trustingly. Her breaths slowed as she slipped into sleep, and then stopped altogether a few seconds later. Crowley pulled his hand away from her chest, pulling the blanket up over her face. 

Then he got up and moved onto the next patient. 

He tended perhaps a dozen others, easing their pain, cleaning their messes, sometimes just holding their hands. It was little enough that he could do, and not nearly what he was capable of, but if he used the big miracles, if Hell found out that he was here easing pain rather than causing it… 

No, he’d already discovered that he couldn’t stop the plague, even with the big miracles at his disposal. Maybe if he had never Fallen, maybe if he was still who he once had been - but those days were long gone, and so he did what he could with what power he had, determined to, if not ease the humans’ suffering, at least not add to it. 

He moved onto the last bed in the camp, an old man with wispy white hair. Crowley gently touched the man on the shoulder to get his attention, and the man slowly rolled from his side to his back, groaning quietly in pain with every little movement. He looked up Crowley - who stared down in horror at Aziraphale’s fever-ravaged face staring back up him. 

This wasn’t - no. No, Aziraphale had never been in this particular camp. Had been nowhere near; he’d been working somewhere on the other side of Europe at the time. And even if he had been here, he was an angel. There was no way for a human illness to affect him. No way for him to be lying in that bed, skin sallow and breaths wheezing painfully in his chest. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale whispered, his voice hoarse. He reached for Crowley with hands that were practically skeletal, hands like Death’s. “Crowley, save me.”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Crowley said, frantically, looking around like something else in the camp might give him the answers he was so desperately looking for. “This isn’t real. You’re not here.”

“Save me,” Aziraphale repeated, clutching at the front of Crowley’s shirt with a surprisingly-strong grip. “You’re killing me, Crowley.”

“No,” Crowley said, helplessly, holding onto Aziraphale’s hands and throwing as much magic as he could into his frail body, Hell be damned. “No, no, no…”

“All your fault, Crowley,” Aziraphale whispered, his eyes growing duller by the second. “We’re all dead because of you.”

Around them, Crowley could hear the sound of shuffling from the other beds, and when he looked behind him, he could see the patients dragging themselves out of bed and coming toward him, eyes crazed. When he looked back at Aziraphale, the angel was smiling, his teeth stained with blood. 

“All your fault,” he repeated, and then his eyes closed for the last time…

Crowley bolted upright in bed, a scream dying on his lips. He could still see Aziraphale’s feverish face, feel those bony hands clutching at him. It had all felt so real. It was all he could do not to call out to Aziraphale, to summon the angel and prove to himself that he was safe. 

He’d heard about dreaming from humans, but he’d never expected it to happen to him. Dreaming required imagination, and that was one of the things demons had lost in the Fall - or so he’d thought. Maybe he’d been spending too much time around humans. 

He certainly wasn’t going to be spending any more time sleeping. Not for a long while, not with those nightmares waiting for him in the dark.

* * *

Crowley almost fell asleep twice on the bus back from Tadfield. He could feel his head drooping to the side, feel his cheek brush the soft silk of Aziraphale’s hair, and the barest touch had him jerking upright again, fully awake and conscious of just how close he was sitting. 

Aziraphale noticed none of it. 

Aziraphale had his gaze fixed firmly out the far windows, staring into the darkness outside the bus and twisting his fingers together anxiously. Crowley longed to reach over and take Aziraphale’s hands, soothe tense muscles and ease his too-obvious fears, but he resisted the urge. After everything that had happened between them recently, Crowley wasn’t sure Aziraphale would welcome any kind of reassurances from him. 

So, instead Crowley shifted his attention to the scrap of prophecy that Aziraphale had grabbed from Agnes Nutter’s book. _‘Choose your faces wisely’_ Agnes had written, _‘for soon you will be playing with fire’_. Choose their faces. Choose-

“I think we’re meant to swap bodies,” he said, suddenly. Beside him, Aziraphale was startled out of his own thoughts and twisted around to look at him. 

“What?”

“Choose our faces wisely,” Crowley told him. “Agnes wants us to swap bodies.”

Aziraphale was silent for a long moment. “Why?” he finally asked, confused. 

“…I don’t know,” Crowley admitted. “I don’t even know that I’m right. I just can’t think of anything else Agnes could have meant for us to do.”

“No, I’m sure you’re right,” Aziraphale said, even though he didn’t look very convinced. “When do you think we need to make this swap?”

“Soon as possible, I’d think,” Crowley said. “Heaven and Hell are going to want revenge, and we should be prepared as soon as possible for it.” Holding out his hand toward Aziraphale, he asked, “Ready?”

Aziraphale nodded, placing his hand in Crowley’s. Crowley focused on meshing his magic with Aziraphale’s, shivering at the feel of the ethereal energy rushing over him. A second later, he found himself looking into his own face. 

“How do I look?” Aziraphale asked, and that was unsettling, hearing his own voice like that.

“Devilishly handsome,” Crowley quipped, getting an eyeroll from Aziraphale before he went back to staring out the window, again. 

“It was very clever of you,” Aziraphale said out of nowhere, a few minutes later. Glancing briefly over at Crowley, he added, “Figuring out Agnes’s prophecy, I mean.”

Crowley shook his head. “You would have figured it out,” he protested. 

“I read the prophecy before you did,” Aziraphale argued. “I read it, and I still couldn’t figure out what it meant. But you did, in such a short amount of time, which is very impressive.”

“It’s not-” Crowley started, but then trailed off at the look he was getting from Aziraphale. 

“Why won’t you ever let me compliment you?” Aziraphale demanded. 

_’Because I don’t deserve it,’_ Crowley thought. Luckily, he was saved from answering by the bus pulling up in front of his building. “Looks like we’re here,” he said, instead. “C’mon, Angel. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.”

* * *

Crowley didn’t get any sleep that night. 

Oh, he dozed off in quick bursts of unconsciousness; after holding the flaming Bentley together and stopping time to defy Lucifer, he was too exhausted to do anything else. But those moments only lasted a few minutes at best, and then he found himself jerking awake to the sound of roaring flames and burning paper or the crushing sensation of Hell’s power grabbing him and trying to pull him back under. 

He also had flashes of Aziraphale. Of the angel’s smile, of gentle touches and whispers of _’You’re so brave, so wonderful,’_ and _‘I love you so much, you know,’_. He dreamt of the kind of tenderness that he’d longed after for centuries. 

In a way, those were almost worse than the nightmares, because he could still feel the yearning when he woke up, could still feel the ghostly impression of Aziraphale’s hands on his skin. He almost preferred the nightmares, because at those were something real, not fantasies cooked up in the depths of his imagination.

And none of it could even remotely be considered restful. It certainly didn’t help that every time he caught sight of his reflection, he found Aziraphale’s face staring back at him instead, like a ghost reminding him of everything that he could have lost. Everything that he could still lose. 

Finally, some time after dawn, he gave up on sleep as a lost cause. Stumbling out of the bedroom, he found Aziraphale sitting on the couch, staring unblinking at an open book. Crowley conspicuously cleared his throat, trying not to startle him, but Aziraphale jolted in his seat anyway, book falling from his hand to land noisily on the floor. 

“I thought you were asleep,” Aziraphale said after a moment, as he bent down to pick his book up off the floor, running his fingers carefully along the spine to make sure he hadn’t damaged it. 

Crowley shook his head. “Couldn’t really sleep,” he admitted. “Nightmares.”

“Is that all you dreamed about?” Aziraphale asked, an odd tone in his voice. “Nightmares? Nothing else?”

“Nothing,” Crowley lied, quickly. He wasn’t about to tell Aziraphale about the other dreams. Not ever. 

“You didn’t dream about anything else?” Aziraphale pressed, an oddly-insistent tone in his voice. “Nothing good? Nothing that made you feel, oh, I don’t know, _loved_?” He shot Crowley an imploring look. 

_’You mean so much to me, Crowley. I’m just sorry that I was never able to tell you before.’_ Crowley flushed at the memory, dream-Aziraphale’s words haunting him. “I didn’t dream about anything, Angel,” he snapped, sharper than he’d intended. “I thought you hated my sleeping. Why do you even care what I may or may not have dreamed about?”

Aziraphale worried at his lip so hard that Crowley almost snapped at him again for trying to damage his corporation. “I guess I don’t,” he said, finally, shoulders slumping, slightly. “Well, if you’re not going to get any sleep, we might as well head out and see if we can lure Heaven and Hell out of hiding.”

He headed for the door, leaving Crowley feeling unbalanced, like he’d just missed something important.

* * *

After that sham of a trial - not even a trial, an execution - that Heaven put on, Crowley strolled out of the hellfire smiling coldly at the angels. “I think it would be best if you and I were to part ways peacefully, don’t you? It would be a shame if you tried to come after me in the future, and it came out to the rest of the Host that you couldn’t kill one little angel with a bit of hellfire.”

No answer was forthcoming, the Archangels staring at him in silent disbelief. Crowley almost laughed at the looks on their faces, but he didn’t want to break his cover now. 

“I’ll be leaving, now,” he announced, spinning on his heel and heading for the door. 

“Aziraphale, wait!” Gabriel’s voice rang out in the cavernous room, echoing around him. Crowley turned slowly around to see the senior Archangel looking at him, a mix of rage and pain on his face. “You can’t seriously be ready to throw away all of this, all of Heaven, for a bunch of humans and some - some _demon_.” He spit out the last word like it was physically paining him. Crowley was petty enough to sincerely hope that it was. 

“What I feel for Crowley, you’ll never understand,” Crowley replied. He felt guilty putting words in Aziraphale’s mouth and silently apologized, but he had to keep up appearances. But he could at least keep it vague. 

“I told Gabriel that you couldn’t be trusted,” Uriel said, eyes hard as she glared at him. “Falling in love with a demon - Aziraphale, how could you?”

Well, so much for keeping it vague. “Love?” he echoed, weakly. 

“Don’t try to play coy with us,” Michael snapped at him, impatiently. “He splashed around in that holy water like he was taking a bath. How could he have done that if you hadn’t blessed him in some way? If you hadn’t _loved_ him?”

So Aziraphale was safe, then, and hopefully on his way back to Earth. Crowley breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Then, the impact of Michael’s words caught up with him. 

“You think Crowley survived because of my love for him?” he asked, carefully. “Maybe he’s just beyond Hell’s power. Like I’m beyond yours.”

Michael shook her head, emphatically. “It’s obvious now, how much you’re in love with that demon,” she said, her voice practically dripping with disgust. “Don’t even try to deny it.”

_’I love you so much, you know,’_ dream-Aziraphale whispered, smiling gently at Crowley. _’So much I’m surprised the whole universe doesn’t see it.’_ Understanding hit Crowley like a freight train, and it was all he could do not to show it on his face. 

“So what if I am in love with him?” he demanded, when he could finally find his voice. “I love him, and there’s nothing you can do about that.” He grinned, feeling triumphant at the stunned looks on the Archangels’ faces. “Leave us alone,” he said, lowering his voice for maximum dramatic effect, “or you’ll find out what we can really do.”

Then, before anyone could react, he turned and headed for the escalator. He had an angel to find, and something very important to confess.

* * *

“That was you in my dream, wasn’t it?” he asked, as they lingered over lunch at the Ritz. 

Aziraphale froze, forkful of cheesecake halfway to his mouth, a comically confused expression on his face. “Um-”

“I thought I was just dreaming,” Crowley told him, “but I know you can enter humans’ dreams, and you did that to me, didn’t you? You came into my dream, and you told me that you loved me.”

“Um-” Aziraphale repeated, weakly.

“Well, I love you, too,” Crowley said, determined to plow on, even though the embarrassed heat creeping up his neck and cheeks. He’d waited too long to say this, and he wasn’t about to let a little thing like shame stop him, now. “I have for a long time. Years, centuries, I don’t even know how long. And I was always afraid to tell you. I’m still afraid,” he admitted after a second. “But if you can be brave and say the words, how can I do anything else?”

Aziraphale blinked, wiping away something that looked like tears. Crowley’s stomach gave an unpleasant twist at the thought that he’d gotten it wrong, but then Aziraphale smiled at him. “So, you finally believe me, now?” he asked. “You believe that I do love you?”

“I think you’re crazy to be in love with me,” Crowley told him. “I certainly haven’t done anything to deserve it.”

Aziraphale reached out and took his hand, squeezing his fingers, gently. “You’re wrong, my dear,” he said, still smiling. “And I’m going to enjoy showing you just how much you do deserve it.”


End file.
